Wolf

  Luck changed—the check came and also an odd-looking package from a friend in New Orleans. I opened it to find only a pack of Cajun cigarettes but then upon opening them I found that I was the proud owner of twenty round, fully packed fat joints. I sat in my room and smoked one lazily and looked at the check which was for nearly a hundred dollars. Moving money. I went downtown immediately with a tremendously aerated brain—my first D train while absolutely stoned. Naturally took a lot longer. I found the room on Grove Street with no difficulty, first looking at a larger room on Macdougal which was too expensive but strangely the place I would end up with Barbara six months later. I paid for the room for a month in advance before I could blow the money, then went back up to Valentine Avenue to get my belongings. Rush hour and packed in like an anchovy tight against a skinny man face to face who peered fixedly over my shoulder. Jesus how terrible to ride this thing every day and I don't understand anyone who would put up with such punishment. I stopped at a place on the Grand Concourse and ate an enormous meal, my first in weeks—some kind of strange Jewish flank steak and some barley soaked with beef juices and garlic and strawberries with sour cream. These bastards knew how to cook—back in Michigan you have a choice of cheeseburgers or chicken fried in rancid batter. When I got back to the room I packed hurriedly stuffing everything in my large cardboard box and binding it with clothesline. I felt terribly sad for a moment—my father standing with me on the platform of the Greyhound bus station and my kissing him on the forehead to say goodbye. When I finished packing I treated myself to another joint which I smoked all the way down to a very small roach, popping it in my mouth with a glass of water. No matter the wild hum, whiskey's still my medicine. Can't help it. A little rest and dreams of my new room and Europe. I lay back on the bed and desperately wanted back the grand I blew on the operation. Take a boat. Too stoned now to do anything but lie back in this rank heat. Cross the big water for the first time for anyone in my family since Grandpa came over from Goteborg in 1892. When they reached the basement of the ghost ship they passed through the galley where tall thin Negroes in red stovepipe hats were boiling tripe for fifth class passengers. Much of the tripe seemed to be slipping off the formica counters onto the bloody and onionskin-strewn cement floor. The bottom of a ship shouldn't be cement? The steward paused long enough to strike the handsomest cook lightly across the neck with a handful of chits. They gazed at each other soulfully and the cook said, “De often dat gar bis bis,” in a heavy Cruzán accent, his face shiny with tripe steam. What did he say? I wondered. But the steward was far ahead with his flashlight beam in the dark corridor. Led into the dark room then the steward said, “Everything A-OK?” Found a cot and listened to the choke and bark of the engines above me, the steady hummer-booger-rak hummer-booger-rak-rak of the pistons in the night, or day, who knew? Then morning, a dim light from the hall under the door. Water rushing past the closed porthole. Below waterline. The cabin was four by six and the light switch was on the floor under the cot. Another cot next to mine with a crone either asleep or dead beneath a sheet printed gaily with blue flowers. I arose from the cot and opened the porthole hoping to see at least a fish but the water rushed by too quickly. I pressed my fingers against the cold moist side of the ship and it crinkled like an oilcan.

  I got up and looked out my window for the last time. Must be about midnight. I left a note with my forwarding address on the bed for the landlord and my room key. I carried my box down the hallway and knocked on Carla's door. She answered quickly and I could see the “gentleman” on the bed behind her. I said goodbye but she was merely pissed off at losing a baby sitter. I walked over to the Concourse and caught the downtown train making sure my new room key was safely in my pocket.

  I reached the tent by late afternoon, my clothes soaked through to the skin—it had been raining lightly but steadily since mid-morning. My feet were a mess. The wet boots had ground and rubbed large blisters in each heel. I stopped and put on some filthy but dry clothes and ate the refried beans cold out of the can. No dry kindling in the tent. I'm going to get out of this fucking place. I smoked three cigarettes in a row and felt a little better though I was dizzy from hunger waiting for the bean energy to occur. Rain pattering on the leaves and tent roof. I opened a can of tinned beef and finished the whole thing in moments with salt spread on it like a white crust. On the way down to the creek for water I crossed some deer tracks—they had snooped around in my absence. Probably a doe. A buck sends the doe along or across a clearing first as a decoy to make sure the path is safe. Sensible. I wanted though to be a lion in the hot Kenyan sun napping while my assorted mates brought me a juicy gazelle; my only function would be to roar warnings to any intruders and screw and eat. Maybe help out with a sturdy Cape buffalo or charge an Abercrombie Fitch hunter from deep cover and bat off his head with one swipe of a paw. I had been in the store a dozen times in the past decade since Barbara first took me there but never had the money to buy anything but a few trout flies. Condescending employees, some of them anyway. To one in the camping department I had said, Look asshole I've been in the woods since I was five and I don't need a snakebite kit in Michigan. Alarmed him. In six days I hadn't so much as seen a wolf track, only the perhaps imaginary shadow crossing the log road near the source of the Huron. I should have stayed there all night and looked at the tracks in the morning or driven the car up the road and looked at them in the headlights but I hadn't thought of it. They certainly had a right not to let me see them. My scent has a bad record for potshotting anything that moves. I checked the tracks again in Olaus Murie, the only book I had brought along.

  As it began to get dark I managed a small fire despite the dampness. There was a slight warm breeze from the south but not enough to drive away mosquitoes so I gathered some ferns to smoke them away. I sat by the fire thinking of how few women I had truly known in my life. If you stood on the corner of Lexington and Fifty-seventh for a day a hundred beautiful women you might wish to know would pass. But the greatest share of them might be vapid, torpid whiners with air-brushed brains. So why should one know many women. A few of my friends were known as “cocksmen” but there was a particular form of boredom that always seemed to accompany their success. Perhaps I was naturally monogamous but it was frightening in some respects to be owned by a single woman. I had no taste though for more than one over any period of time. I was either trembling like a whippet dog over some girl or almost completely turned off. How many endless love letters have I written and I could list those to whom they were sent and the list would number less than ten. When I think of the snickering, giggling, elbowing, guffawing that goes on in bars, barbershops, locker rooms, club-houses, dormitories, I'm appalled that I've habitually taken part in it. Simply part of not growing up assuming there's a point to grow towards. Never read anything very sage on the matter. Testing one two three. Distances. Coming together but one of you is still on Saturn and the other on Jupiter. Bull elk bugling. We could hear it miles away in the Tom Miner basin. Who wants to come challenge me for my absence of harem. I should be one of those Indians who combined magic and witchcraft and buffoonery by doing everything backwards.

  I lit the only cigar I had brought along. Addictive. Used to smoke twenty Dutch Master panatellas a day. I explored my muscles again—they were strangely more there than six days ago but then I must have dropped ten pounds of lard out here looking for a beast that is said to exist. Not even a scat. Melancholy. Laurie's plump butt, white teeth, precocious senility being beaten down to insanity in New York. As I had gone goony for sequences in my life and would only refer to myself in the third person and change my signature every day. Or where are the three of them now and does it matter? Think of the grove of willows by that creek and the tubular stalks of what we called snake grass. Her wet violet smell and the light from the next room passing between her thighs through which I could see the couch and a book on a pillow. I'm never cool enough but jerk around, a horse in double hobbles. That girl in high school burned me bu
t got knocked up by a fireman and is probably happy now. Perhaps Mrs. Chief. The great gush out of the pig's throat when Walter cut it and again the wet throat of the stillborn calf in a pen in the barn, the mother bawling horribly. Twenty-five years later I can hear her bawl and I told grandfather I was sorry he lost the calf while he ate his herring the next morning and I carried the slop pail to the hogs. Nature doesn't heal, it diverts and because we are animals too all this silence is a small harmony. If I stayed I would go berserk and shrink into a wooden knot. I once thought there were only two natural courses for a man, savior or poet; now at its vulgarest level either voting or not bothering to. I don't care about anyone's problem only the occasional luminescence we offer to each other. Fifty grand worth of creature comforts. Yes of course but a poor thing to trade a life for I think. And do options exist and if they did would I see them? When I proselytized I gave bad advice from boredom with giving advice. Taught one course but I can't be a walking blood bank. I let myself be transfused by winter and seven feet of snow and crossing comparatively trackless wastes in both winter and summer. Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone—rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.

  I thought I heard something and received the accompanying split-second shot of adrenaline, the hand reaching for the rifle. Nothing beyond the pale light of the fire. And a hundred years ago or more I might have been the sort of person who fucked it up for the Indians blazing ignorantly the way for waves of settlers to follow. Or I always wanted to be a cowboy but those I know only break horses, adjust the irrigation, put up hay, drink, and hit each other. Inside a butcher shop I see a side of prime beef on a huge maple block. Crawl up on it and start chewing with a case of red wine and a salt shaker and see how much I could eat. Then have a three-dollar Havana cigar, purged of human problems; only beef problems and those briefly solved with the taste of steer, wine, salt and fine Havana leaf in my mouth. And the smell of the cedar box the cigar came in. Then a lovely janitress would come in with her broom and see me there and I'd push what was left of the carcass off onto the floor and she would get on and draw off all the poison left. I told a girl once that it backs up and gives you migraine headaches so please co-operate. Push her off onto the carcass when we finished. Not quite a prime beef janitress. Picked cherries all day once thinking of Laurie a thousand miles away, a hot afternoon, hands and arms sticky with red juice, clothes wet with itching sweat. I climbed up the water tank used to fill the sprayers and slid into the water down to the bottom, looking up at the wide circle of light above me and wanted to be a fish.

  I met her in Bryant Park behind the library where I had brought a sandwich during my lunch hour. First three doubles at a White Rose on Sixth then a sandwich in the park. I was reading Henry Miller's biography on Rimbaud and she was with a group of a half dozen young people who were obviously what the press liked to call “beatniks.” She came up to me and said directly into my face, “I've read that book.”

  I was so startled I couldn't answer. She was very pretty and you usually have to approach pretty girls, they don't approach you.

  —We're going up to the park. Want to come?

  —I have to work.

  I paused then and looked at her closely to see if she was putting me on. The rest of them approached us and started talking about Miller and Céline, then about Kerouac whose On the Road had appeared that year. They seemed very friendly and intense but unassuming.

  —Wait three minutes. I'll tell my boss I'm sick.

  I ran across Forty-second Street and told my boss at Marboro's where I worked as a stock clerk that I had just puked all over the park and was going home for the afternoon. He waved me away with a “so OK.” I rejoined them in the park and we headed up Fifth.

  We were together constantly after that initial meeting. I stopped seeing a girl from Nebraska who lived on Perry Street and who was only using me anyway—her fiancé worked out on the tip of Long Island and every Friday afternoon we would have a drink at Penn Station and say goodbye for the weekend. And I had already met Barbara but it was only for one night and day and I had no idea she would reappear. I had moved out of my Grove Street room for the better one on Macdougal with its little black rat hole in the corner over which I put the grate from the oven.

  We stuck it out through a mutual sense of melancholy, a total unhappiness with everything. She was much brighter than I was and had read more of everything. So we made endless trips to everything that was cheap especially the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was the first Jewish girl I had ever known. She wasn't terribly interested in sex but I was insistent in my own neurotic confusion—a number of homosexuals had made passes and I had worried that there was something in my conduct that made them see the potential homosexual in me. So I was bent on proving I wasn't queer to myself by getting into every girl in the Village I could get my hands on. I was very close to proposing when Barbara entered the store on an October afternoon and coolly took over again.

  I began packing at dawn. It was cold and very windy, the weather changing in the middle of the night. February and November have always been my worst months in Michigan because of the wind. It deafens and depresses me and I can usually do nothing but drink and look out the window waiting for a change. If I didn't despise the act of asking for help I long ago would have asked a psychiatrist if climatic changes affected many people. I knew that a disproportionate number of people died between three and five in the morning. Stig Dagerman whose work I was very much taken with committed suicide in the winter even though Harriet Anderson was his lover. I had absorbed too much Strindberg and there were many suicides in my family history, either by the long route of alcohol or the short one of the shotgun pressed to the head. Bang, his brains were still hearing it, synapses ringing, as they flecked the wall. Wish I could ask him what he's doing now. Absolutely nothing. Seven to one odds on nothing, over and over. Keep the bet open. I gathered everything into a pile and rolled up the sleeping bag and tent—the tent was too goddamn heavy and wet, a surplus pup tent and I wondered if any soldiers had spent their last night in it before emerging at dawn to slay either Nips or Nazis. O Tojo. What fear we once felt at his name, apocalyptic samurai. I stomped on and crushed the tin cans and then with a great deal of effort and broken fingernails dug a hole with my hatchet and hands. I hacked away at the ground as if I were trying to murder it until I had a hole deep enough to cover all the refuse with a foot of dirt. In high school if I felt bad enough I would come home and dig a garbage hole at the end of my father's garden deep enough to bury myself. Digging soothes as does crawling. Stalking a fox as a recipe—crawl a hundred yards through brake, sumac, vetch and when you stand again your brain will be at ease. Wish I could jettison the tent. The total pack weighed over sixty pounds and ditching the tent would cut the weight in half. Fucking wind rising to thirty knots from the southwest—look at those tree tips bend with gusts and the roar of it. Even with two pairs of dry socks my heels ached from the blisters.

  By mid-morning I was ready, with the campside looking as if no one had been there, the effect I wanted. No scars. I think of my brain as striated with scar tissue the color of the marl you can dig up from lake bottoms. I even dusted the ground with a handful of branches.

  The pack had a body-formed aluminum frame but after three miles I was in wheezing pain. I lay back on it against a birch tree and had a cigarette and then had to struggle like an overturned turtle to get up. My feet seemed wet and I was sure the blisters were raw enough to have started bleeding. I headed more directly west hoping to pick up the log road and follow it south to the car. There was a vague chance too that I might see some tracks crossing the road. God send a helicopter and I'll become a missionary to the heathen wherever you want me to go. Accept this small bribe and you won't be sorry. Silence except for wind's Wailing and I looked at the dark cumuli scudding above me. And don't let it start raining until I get to the car, that's an order gourd and salute. A sense of blasphemy from all that time spent with the Bi
ble—at fifteen I intended to become a Baptist evangelist. I stumbled onto the log road sooner than I expected so I stopped to take a compass reading—it might be the wrong log road. But it ran north and south so I figured it had to at least lead to the right road. Within a few hundred yards I came upon an old bulldozer the pulp people used to reach new stands of timber. LeTourneau diesel. Wonder if I could start it—used to be able to hot-wire cars. I shed my pack and got upon the seat. Rummmmm rummmm, I yelled, tinkering with the throttle and the two steering handles and the handle to hydraulically lift the blade. Then I rememberd that bulldozers of that size have a small auxiliary gas engine to get their huge diesels started. I got down and found the small Briggs-Stratton but the gas tank was empty. I impulsively dumped a handful of sand in it and another handful in the diesel oil tank. Could see it thrashing to a stop after a hundred yards with all that sand in the workings. Ho ho. Don't cut down my trees even if they're useless poplar. I thought of dropping a match in the oil tank then hesitated—I didn't want to start a forest fire. I smoked another cigarette sitting in the comfortable seat and making noises then got down and unstrapped my tent and threw it over the seat. A gift to the pulpers to keep their seats dry. The change in load made me happy and I quickened my pace despite the pain in my feet. I sang the national anthem but forgot the words toward the end and invented my own. I sang Buck Owens’ “It's Crying Time Again” and Dolly Parton's “Blue Ridge Mountain Boy” and finally Schiller's “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven's Ninth, and hummed a Schutz and a Buxtehude piece. By the time I reached the car I was just finishing “The Old Rugged Cross” after a quick run through the Jefferson Airplane's “White Rabbit.” I was considerably more than ten feet tall. I quickly took off my clothes and ran down the creek bank and jumped in beneath the waterfall. The water seemed colder than three days before. I rubbed my hands and body with wet sand then got out and sat on the warm car hood until the wind dried my body, raising goose pimples. Where's my coryphee now that I want her wantonly here—into the warm back seat for pushups and pushdowns and other good time-proven variations the Creator put in our heads to cause joy. My small share in it must be enlarged I think, pleasure up thirty-three points on the small board. And the use of dynamite. For charming nature back to her own sweet self. Take that rush of water as an exhilarant. A premier danseur of I'm not sure and perhaps never will be. Light fuses alone with a single match. Romance. Bloodless though as too much blood has been let. Just a few dams, bridges, signs, machines.